


The Truth About Budapest

by camichats



Category: Marvel
Genre: Avengers Family, Gen, What Happened in Budapest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 19:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16001606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/camichats/pseuds/camichats
Summary: "This is like Budapest all over again!" Natasha said, shooting at the aliens.Clint made a face, pulling arrows from his quiver and releasing rapidly, dropping enemies like they were flies. "You and I remember Budapest very differently."When the battle was over and they were all caught up on sleep and became more like a team than a group of people pushed together by terrible circumstances, everyone asked them about what had happened in Budapest.And all the answers were different."





	The Truth About Budapest

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe I couldn't find any Budapest fics set up like this

**"This is like Budapest all over again!" Natasha said, shooting at the aliens.**

**Clint made a face, pulling arrows from his quiver and releasing rapidly, dropping enemies like they were flies. "You and I remember Budapest very differently."**

When the battle was over and they were all caught up on sleep and became more like a team than a group of people pushed together by terrible circumstances, everyone asked them about what had happened in Budapest.

And all the answers were different.

**Steve:**

Clint rolled his eyes as Natasha opened her mouth to say something, cutting her off before she could get a word out. "She was undercover, and she's still pissed off that I missed the ballet she was in. I _said_ that I was sorry," he said, looking at her pointedly.

"I've never missed one of _your_ cover's dates," she said haughtily.

"You did so!"

"When?"

"Paris, 2004, we were supposed to meet up for-"

Steve backed away slowly from the argument until he was out of the room. He wasn't sure the answer he got was worth what it started, but at least they were yelling at each other and not him.

**Bruce:**

"It wasn't actually anything special," Clint said with a shrug, perusing the options for new arrows that Tony had made for him. "Nat just likes to be a dick about it."

Bruce frowned. "Well what happened?"

"The safe house we were supposed to stay in was unusable. Ceiling had caved in and there wasn't a basement, but we didn't have anywhere else to go so," he shrugged. "Pulled up a blanket and slept next to the rubble and hoped that it didn't crush us in our sleep."

Bruce rolled his eyes. There was no need to be so dramatic, but he guessed that living as a spy/assassin like Clint had for over a decade would have some sort of lasting effects, and if those effects were embellishing boring stories to make them seem more life threatening, well, there were far worse things that could have happened. "Sounds pleasant," was all he said though, continuing on his way to the kitchenette.

**Sam:**

"Hm?" Natasha said, looking up from where she was cleaning her gun. "Oh." She snorted. "Clint fell in a dumpster in the middle of a fight."

"He fell," Sam repeated flatly. "In a dumpster."

"If you can't picture it, I can help you out. It's one of my most cherished memories; I'm thinking about commissioning a painting."

"How did that even happen? Did he get pushed?"

An amused smile quirked on her lips. "That wouldn't be nearly embarrassing enough. He was jumping out of a window, but he chose the wrong one. There was supposed to be a fire escape, only he went two windows too early and landed in the dumpster."

"Oh my god," Sam said, howling with laughter.

"It was half full, he landed in sludge, and sprained his wrist. And to top it all off, he didn't catch a shower for two days after that."

"This explains so much about him," Sam said, doubled over and wiping at his eyes.

Natasha nodded and went back to putting her gun together. "It really does," she muttered.

**Tony:**

Tony, being Tony, didn't actually ask either Natasha or Clint what happened; he tried to hack into Shield's servers to get the information. He'd entertained the idea of asking for a moment, but he brushed it aside when he realized that he wouldn't get a straight answer from either of them-- and if he did, it would certainly be a lie.

So he decided to look into it himself, and he tried to hack the file. _Tried._ It wasn't that Shield's security had suddenly gotten exponentially better, it was that the file _wasn't there_. There was barely even a mention of it, and that mention was in one of Coulson's reports, and it wasn't even a report he should have been doing! It was an injury report that he filled out _for_ Clint, and it didn't say anything that Tony didn't already know. It happened in Budapest, and he had to be checked over by a medical team.

 _Woo_ , he thought dully. Clint got sent to the medical team twice for every fight-- once for the fight itself, and once for the in between times when he did something stupid like grab a pan from the oven without an oven mitt on. (And that had been a sad day. He'd put all the pizza rolls on one giant sheet and then dropped them all over the floor, and they didn't get another grocery delivery for four days. Clint basically starved in that time, _and_ his hand was too burnt for him to use his bow.)

So, armed with nothing other than annoyance and a decade old injury report, Tony decided to bother Coulson for a while. Under the guise of being helpful, of course.

...Aaaand Coulson herded Tony out of his office, expression never changing from carefully impassive, although Tony would like to think that he detected a hint of frustration on the air-- and with the lack of actual answers he was willing to take what he could get.

The next approach was Clint, and he tried to bribe him with stun arrows, but Clint must have been tired out of his mind at the time that he asked because he started singing Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and waltzed away. Tony frowned after him, frozen in place and more than a little confused. Was this how other people felt when he dodged questions? Because if it was, he owed Pepper an apology or two hundred. Rhodey too, but more like a thousand for him, since he'd been around when Tony was a teenager.

He asked Natasha after a sparring session, and afterwards asked her about Budapest. She stared at him evenly for a moment, taking a swig of water. She walked past and pat him on the shoulder. "You had good balance today."

**Bucky:**

"Why?" Natasha asked, glancing over at him. He was on one of Tony's spruced up treadmills next to her normal one. They usually ran in silence when they worked out together, but here he was, asking her about Budapest out of the blue.

"Just... r'membered somethin' I think." He had that little scrunch to his forehead that meant he was trying to dust off a memory.

"You were in Budapest?" she asked, lowering the speed on her treadmill so she didn't get too winded.

"At some point, yeah. What happened with you?"

"It was like a romance novel," she said, pitching her voice higher and putting on a nondescript accent for effect. "I saw Clint across the cafe and he offered me a flower." She put her wrist to her forehead and stopped running, letting the track pull her to the end and then off. It took her body a second to get used to a still ground, and she hopped back on once she got her bearings.

Bucky snorted. "You coulda just said no, y'know."

"Now where's the fun in that," she said, shooting him a smirk that he returned.

"You gonna tell me someday?"

"On my deathbed, maybe."

**The Truth:**

The truth about Budapest was that it was a mission gone horribly wrong, yet somehow neither of them came close to dying. Clint had gotten doused with a hallucinogenic gas at some point-- she still didn't know how that happened, and Clint either didn't remember or wasn't talking.  

So Clint started hallucinating and thought he was back at the circus, and he ended up all but destroying a building and blowing their cover as non-Americans. The gang they'd been there to investigate had automatically pulled out their guns, and Natasha was left trying to herd him out of the building between rubble and shrieking civilians. Luckily for them, none of the gang members wanted to risk hurting civilians either, so she was able to get Clint out of the way before anything serious went down.

Strangely enough, the gang wasn't an issue. They made an alliance against the actual troublemakers of the city, and the mission continued on. It wasn't as planned, but it all worked out in the end. (Except for the fact that Clint was out of it for their entire visit and learned about what had happened from Natasha telling him.)

So when Natasha referenced Budapest, it could mean that there were drugs, that they had the wrong idea, that Clint was being stupid, or... any number of things, really. Clint had given up on trying to figure out what the exact connection was because it changed every time.

If the Winter Soldier had been there at the same time, they didn’t run into him, and Natasha was endlessly grateful for that.

(Bucky remembered, a few years later, that Budapest had been one of the brief time periods that he’d run away from Hydra before being picked up and wiped again. He’d seen Clint and Natasha there because he was in the same bar that Clint had nearly destroyed in his delirium, and he gave them both shit for it when he got the memory back.)


End file.
